The nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance has been accused of misreporting their data in order to secure several million dollars from the NIH.

From Fox News. House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans are calling for further investigation into EcoHealth Alliance and its president after the organization allegedly withheld certain COVID-19 research data from peer reviewers in an effort to retain funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that claims it is dedicated to “protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of disease,” is facing scrutiny from Republicans over information it provided in reports related to its “humanized mice experiments” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, according to a lengthy letter obtained by Fox News Digital that the Republicans sent to NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak on Monday.

Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.; Brett Guthrie, R-Ky.; and Morgan Griffith, R-Va., signed the letter, which addresses multiple concerns from Republicans and asks the agency to determine whether certain data was “intentionally withheld” to preserve a grant from the NIH after a committee review of reports from EcoHealth found multiple discrepancies….

The five-year grant, according to the letter, was provided from June 2014 to May 2019 and required EcoHealth to provide yearly progress reports to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). A peer reviewed grant renewal application submitted by EcoHealth determines if – and how much – funding would be provided.

Around the beginning of November 2018, EcoHealth submitted a renewal application to NIAID and the grant was renewed for another five years. That grant, issued prior to EcoHealth submitting its Year 5 progress report, was valued at $3.7 million plus a $369,819 increase over the first award, the letter said.

“EcoHealth first proposed testing chimeric SARS-like viruses in a humanized mice experiment to evaluate pathogenicity in the spring of 2016,” the letter stated. “The NIH approved this research in July 2016 with the condition that EcoHealth immediately stop its experiments and report to the NIH if there was more than one log of virus growth in any of mice groups infected with one of the chimeric viruses….”

The Republicans claimed the organization deleted the word “dead” from the term “dead point” in a paragraph of its renewal application and described infected mice in the experiment with a 75% death rate as only having “mild” clinical symptoms.

In addition, the Republicans stated that the complete results of the experiment showed discrepancies and omissions that would have prompted questions from peer reviewers about the conduct of the experiment….

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(Excerpt from Fox News. Photo Credit: Drew Hays on Unsplash)